Credit: Emily Dollery
Therapy Horse’s new single, SISTER TO NONE, doesn’t arrive gently. It lumbers into the room like a wounded animal, carrying with it the weight of every whispered doubt, every online sneer, every “Why didn’t she leave?” that has ever been weaponised against a survivor.
At its core, the track is a reckoning. A mirror held up to the ugliest corners of public discourse.
“The song is about victim blaming and internalised misogyny,” Emily (vocals/bass) says. “I’m often troubled by the way survivors are treated in discourse, and I don’t think I’m alone in my noticing an uptick of misogynistic online rhetoric in the last few years. I find the way that people talk about instances of harm is often rife with misconceptions – your usual ‘Why didn’t she leave / She just wants attention / It can’t have happened to him / She doesn’t act like a real victim.’”
It’s the kind of statement that doesn’t need embellishment. The band isn’t theorising from a distance; they’re responding to a cultural climate that has grown sharper, colder, more suspicious of pain.
Like much of Therapy Horse’s catalogue, SISTER TO NONE was born in the rehearsal room, during one of those jams where something raw and unfiltered suddenly crystallises.
“It’s probably our most bitter song,” Emily says. “It was largely sparked by my frustrations at victim blaming rhetoric being spread online. The song took shape through months of gigging, jamming and refining structures and textures.”
The emotional centre is a single line – a knife‑edge of accusation and disbelief:
“You caught me alive / And called me a liar.”
It’s the lyric that holds the whole track in its jaws. The idea of being “caught alive”, trapped in the aftermath, pinned by other people’s narratives, becomes the song’s central wound.
Cormac (vocals/ guitar/ electronics) describes the evolution of the track with the clarity of someone who has lived inside its architecture. “The baseline of the track – Emily’s lyrics and insistent bassline, my slow‑building feedback guitar part building into a doom‑laden conclusion – came very quickly,” he says. The song has been a near‑constant in their live sets ever since. But the biggest transformation came from Schuch’s drums:
“He experimented with different ways to facilitate the dynamic buildup which is really essential to SISTER TO NONE, and the part which we ended up with is perfect at doing just that.”
Cormac’s visual association is strangely perfect. “I always associate this song with a large, slow‑moving animal… like an elephant maybe. And this song is very grey to me, metallic.” Where earlier releases (LOVE / MERCY, LET ME BE CLEAR) felt stark in their black‑and‑white contrasts, SISTER TO NONE lives in a different palette: industrial, bruised, heavy with weather.
Choosing the next single wasn’t simple, but SISTER TO NONE had already proven itself in the wild. “We were very confident in its impact in terms of the live set,” Cormac says. “We all really relished playing it live and enjoyed the visible effect it seemed to have on audiences.”
In the studio, producer Andy Killian understood the assignment immediately. The band pushed further into processed vocals, electronic textures, and the murky shoegaze/noise‑rock hybrid that has become their signature. “It’s still recognisably us,” Cormac says, “but we felt that it represented a progression.” And that’s exactly what SISTER TO NONE is: a sharpening of teeth.
Therapy Horse are offering catharsis through confrontation. A slow, heavy, grey‑toned confrontation that demands listeners to reconsider the narratives they’ve absorbed.
SISTER TO NONE OUT NOW.
Words by
Marie Müller, 2026.